From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Fri Feb 23 2001 - 09:44:23 MST
At 6:44am -0800 2/23/01, Brian D Williams wrote:
>From: Harvey Newstrom <mail@HarveyNewstrom.com>
>
> > They stopped giving out ballots for corrections.
>
>There was not one word of it here. I leave it to conspiracy
>theoristists as to why.
No conspiracy. Local news always devote more time to in-state issues
than national news.
>Incorrect, there is a federal law that specifically states that
>military absentee ballots do not require postmarks.
Reference, please? One of the many complaints about this election is
that there were no uniform standards. Each state set their own
rules. As far as I know, only Florida election law was used to
regulate this election. That was part of why the Supreme Court was
hesitant to get involved and kept throwing everything back to the
Florida Supreme Court. I would like to see a reference to any
federal law that described ballot requirements.
>It seems like there are a number of problems to be corrected.
Definitely! The real scandal here is not that this election was so
screwed up, but that all elections work this way. All military votes
have been historically thrown out because of missing postmarks. Some
counties historically have 50% throw-away ballots where the machines
don't work while reading them. Absentee ballots are routinely
ignored because the election would already be decided by the time the
absentee deadline came up later. Write-in votes are routinely
ignored because there was never any chance of write-in candidates
effecting the election outcome. Most counties never even try to
count the write-in votes, even for the major candidates, because it
never mattered before. (This is where many uncounted ballots are
coming from.
Nobody cared about these problems until we had an election that was
close enough that the margin of error was greater than our ability to
count. Basically the Supreme Court ruled that we had run out of time
and we couldn't take the time to count all the votes properly. The
system not only failed, but apparently it routinely fails. One of
the lawsuits about voting irregularities was dismissed by a Florida
judge on the very grounds that all these occurrences are normal and
were known to have occurred in previous elections. He ruled that
nothing unusual happened here and that the election occurred
routinely as expected.
>This is my mistake for not being clearer. I was referinng to those
>who called in saying they had accidentally voted for Buchanon (sp?)
>this number was something like three times the total number of
>votes received.
I agree with this. With all the reporting occurring, people were
unsure if they voted correctly or not. Even people in other counties
that did not have the confusing ballot were convinced that they voted
for the wrong person. There is no way to count this accurately after
the fact, and unfortunately, nobody kept records of complaints during
the election day. Although we know there were enough complaints to
cause signs to be posted and replacement ballots to run out, but
nobody knows how many ballots were screwed up after that.
-- Harvey Newstrom <http://HarveyNewstrom.com>
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